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At this Mr Veil threw back his bony head to laugh. The sound was intolerably cold and cruel.

The man was deadly enough without his laugh but with it he became deadly in another way. For there was no humour in it. It was a noise that came out of a hole in the man’s face. A sound that left Titus under no illusion as to the man’s intrinsic evil. His body, limbs and organs and even his head could hardly be said to be any fault of his, for this was the way in which he had been made; but his laughter was of his own making.

As the blood ran into Titus’ face there was a movement in the darkness, and the boy turned his head at once.

‘Who’s there?’ he cried, and as he cried, the thin man Veil took a spidery step towards him.

‘Come back, pup!’

The menace in the voice was so horrible that Titus jumped ahead into the darkness, and immediately his foot struck something that yielded, and at the same time there was a sob from immediately below him.

As he knelt down he could see the faint pattern of a human face in the gloom. The eyes were open.

‘Who are you?’ whispered Titus. ‘What has happened to you?’

‘No … no,’ said the voice.

‘Raise your head,’ said Titus, but as he began to lift the vague body, a hand fixed its fingers, like pincers, into his shoulder, and with one movement, not only jerked Titus to his feet, but sent him spinning against the wall, where a slant of pale, wet light illumined his face.

Written across his young features was something not so young; something as ancient as the stones of his home. Something uncompromising. The gaze of civility was torn from his face as the shrouding flesh can be torn from the bone. A primordial love for his birth-place, a love which survived and grew, for all that he had left his home, for all that he was a traitor, burned in him with a ferocity that he could not understand. All he knew was that as he stared at the spider-man, he, Titus, began to age. A cloud had passed over his heart. He was not so much in the thick of an adventure as alone with something that smelt of death.

Where Titus leaned against the wall the cold brick ran with moisture. It ran through his hair and spread out over his brows and cheekbones. It gathered about his lips and chin and then fell to the ground in a string of water-beads.

His heart pounded. His hands and knees shook, and then, out of the gloom the Black Rose re-appeared.

‘No, no, no! Keep to the darkness, whoever you are!’

At these words the Black Rose swayed and sank again to the floor, and then with a great effort she raised herself on her elbow and whispered, ‘Kill the beast.’

The spider had turned his small, bony head in her direction and in an instant Titus (with no weapons to slice or stab, and with no scruples, for he knew that within a minute he would be fighting for his life) brought up his knee with all the force he could muster. As he did this the spider leaned forward so that the full force of the blow was driven immediately below the ribs; but the only sound to be heard was that of a rush of air as it sped hissing from between his jaws. This was the only sound. He made no kind of groan: he merely brought his hands together, the fingers making a kind of grid to protect the solar plexus, as he bent himself double.

This was Titus’ moment. He stumbled his way to the Black Rose: lifted her, and panting as he ran, he made for a blur of light which seemed to hang in the air some distance to the west where the wet floor, the walls and the ceiling were suffused with a vaporous, slug-coloured glow.

As he ran he saw (although he hardly knew he had seen it) a family move by, then stop, and draw itself together, and stare: then came another group and then another, as though the very walls exuded them. Figures of all kinds, from all directions. They saw the boy stumbling with his burden, and paused.

Veil, meanwhile, had all but recovered from the knee-stab, and was following Titus with merciless deliberation. But for all the speed of his spindly legs he was not in time to see Titus kneel down and lay the Black Rose on the ground where a